RUSH: Here’s Robert in Germantown, Maryland. It’s great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: (garbled connection) Rush, how are you, sir? Long-time listener. I can’t even believe I’m talking to you after all these years. Live long and prosper and all the other good things that go with it.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: Yeah, I’m calling you again from the People’s Republic of Maryland — Montgomery County, Maryland. I was wondering. The previous caller has taken away a little bit of what I wanted to talk about with how the Republicans have put themselves in a position where their agenda is being quashed by the media, and not taking advantage of the nuclear option as the Democrats did — as you had mentioned — for the pushing of Obamacare. But I think a bigger picture is this:

You know, you look at what Janet Napolitano did before she left and Fast and Furious and the bullets, and here he just signed a… The government bought up all that ammo. I can’t remember the exact caliber. Now on top of it, he signed yesterday an executive order to ban that same type of ammunition. So basically it seems, if you look at puzzle that these people have put out there — which is mostly confusing because there’s a new item every day — I think that’s why no one can really get a grip on any of this.

RUSH: Because they never stop? There’s no time to react and adjust because there’s something new every day, you mean?

CALLER: Yeah. It’s just craziness. (chuckles) We hear… You know, talking about what’s going on in the Middle East right now, not to mention Vladimir. Remember what you had said and what we all heard? You know, Obama will have “more flexibility after the election.” What kind of flexibility was it when we keep on giving away everything but the kitchen sink and getting nothing in return?

RUSH: Well, let me try to explain why. This is a good observation here. It’s one that we have made on previous occasions in many and varied different ways. We had a caller last week named Vinny from Queens. There’s about 10 of those. There’s 10 guys, 10 Vinnies. They’re from Queens; the Bronx; Camden, New Jersey, you name it. They rotate calling in here. Vinny wasn’t able to hang on, but he was frustrated. He wanted to disagree with me.

He thinks it is time to panic. He thinks it is over, and one of the things he was going to say is, “No matter what we come up with, they’ve got an answer for it. No matter what we do, no matter what trick we try to play, no matter what way we try to prevail, they’ve got an answer for it.” I’m gonna tell you why this perception exists, Vinny’s perception. I’m gonna tell you why it is, and I’m sure a lot of people probably in frustration agree with that. The reason is very simple.

It can be found in the phenomenon known as “ideology.”

Say what you want about them, the liberals are committed to implementing their agenda, come hell or high water. Their agenda is pure ideology. They are driven by it. They are devoted to it, committed to it. It is their religion. It is their life. As you well know, every liberal demands that whatever his pet issue is, you either agree or be silenced. If it’s behavior, you either behave doing the same thing they do and the way they demand or you get punished. Militant vegetarians are not content to let you have a Big Mac.

You are going to be excoriated for doing so. McDonald’s is gonna be excoriated for providing them. The beef industry is gonna be excoriated for destroying the planet. If you say the wrong things? Say you’re global warming “denier,” they set out to destroy you! There’s a member of the House, a Democrat, who has sent letters to seven universities demanding that those universities explain the funding for any professors on campus who “deny” climate change.

This is an inquisition!

Never mind the fact that every liberal scientist promoting global warming is bought and paid for with this grant and that grant and those grants over there. It is their source of living. They found a global warming denier who had happened to take a grant donation from an oil company, and this member of Congress, Raul Grijalva or something like that, got on his case. Remember, they’re in the minority in the House. The Democrats are in the minority!

This guy gets on his high horse and he sends letters out to seven universities demanding the universities do an investigation and reveal all sources of income for every professor who is a “global warming denier.” Now, this is ideology. They are committed to it. They are driven by it. They are devoted to it; they are absorbed by it. It is the reason they get out of bed every day. It is the reason they hate going to sleep every night.

They do not want to take a moment off! They are constantly doing nothing but conspiring, meeting, talking, planning, writing, teaching, you name it, their agenda, all based on their ideology of extreme madcap liberalism/socialism. On the other side, you have the Republican Party, who is what? The Republican Party does not have an agenda that you can identify, and the Republican Party has done its best to abandon the competing ideology to liberalism, and that would be conservatism.

The Republican Party is attempting to say that the foremost practitioner and the biggest success story of conservatism, Ronald Reagan, is passe! The Republican Party is trying to say, “The era of Reagan is over.” Do you ever hear the Democrats say the era of FDR is over? The era of JFK? The era of LBJ is over. Do you ever hear them say, “The era of the Great Society is over and we must modernize our thinking”? You never hear them say that.

The Republicans undercut their own agenda, and they do not have an ideology, folks. That’s why the left has an answer for everything we do, because we’re not even competing against them at that level. The Republican objectives are totally different than the Democrat objectives. The Democrat objective in winning office is to wield power, to implement their agenda, to silence their critics, to do away with their critics, to promote their friends, to use the federal Treasury to fund their efforts and to defund the efforts of the opposition.

The Republican Party, this may as well be Greek to them. There’s no way. This is not how they view the world. They certainly eschew conservatism. They have no agenda; they have no ideology. There is nothing competing with liberalism. There’s not even a fight ideologically going on! The Republican desire to win elections is not rooted in advancing any kind of an agenda, as we see now. They’re not trying to stop amnesty. They’re halfheartedly trying to stop Obamacare.

There is no competing ideology within the opposition party.

It is in the Tea Party, it is with grassroots Americans, it is with several governors. But in terms of the national Republican Party, there is no ideological driving force behind their purpose. If there were, this would be an entirely different landscape. If there were, this would be an entirely different ballgame. If there were committed conservatives who knew it, loved it, understood it, and could articulate it, the Democrats would have a much tougher time getting passed what they do.

They would have a much tougher time getting public support for their ideas. But conservatism isn’t even on the field, and that’s why it appears we don’t have an answer. You and I do. The Republican Party doesn’t. They want to win so they can have committee chairmanships in the Senate. You say, “What good is that?” Well, that’s power, folks. That’s in charge of the money. The Republican desire to win, when they articulate it, is rooted in what? Stopping Obama, maybe?

They didn’t even say that during the most recent midterm election. They didn’t even have an announced agenda! Individual Republican candidates did, and the number one thing they claimed they were gonna stop was Obamacare. (Number two was amnesty, but that didn’t get very far.) There’s no alternative ideology competing with liberalism, in politics. There is here on talk radio. There is occasionally at Fox News. There is in the blogosphere. Conservatism is robust. It is alive and well, and it is thriving.

Except in the political arena.

I’m talking about on a national party-wide basis. So if the left is totally driven by its ideology, and it’s dominated by it… I mean, that’s all they care about. Folks, you and I get up and wanna go play golf, or we’ll go to a ballgame or family get-together, picnic. These people, every waking moment is devoted to two things: Advancing their agenda and destroying ours. If they ever do go to a ballgame, that’s what they’re talking about. They’re not watching the game.

That is their recreation. It’s their religion. It’s their recreation. It’s their avocation. It’s their vocation. It is everything about them. It’s their identity. It’s not that they’re absorbed about it or immersed in it. It is what they are, and that’s why they seem to have an answer for everything we do, because there is really no competing ideology. This is why for a couple of years here I’ve been saying that if we could convince more and more low-information Americans and educated them about ideology, if everybody understood…

By the way, 1988 — not that long ago, 26 years, a generation — one word and one picture defeated Michael Dukakis. Dukakis was running for the presidency opposed to George H. W. Bush, who was the sitting vice president and was promising to be the third term of Ronald. So he was promising more conservatism. There were two things that defeated Michael Dukakis. One was the word “liberal.” All it took 26 years ago to defeat a Democrat in a presidential race was to correctly identify them as a liberal.

The American people wanted no part of it. The other thing that did him in is when he posed as Beetle Bailey in a tank wearing an army helmet. He looked like a young fool. He looked the antithesis of presidential. It was a laugh riot. That coupled with… Well, there’s a third thing. During a debate Bernard Shaw (State-Controlled Media of the day at CNN), asked Dukakis if his wife were raped, what he would do.

Dukakis actually said something (I’m paraphrasing) along the lines, “Well, Bernard, that’d require investigation of all the facts, and we would make sure the civil rights of everybody involved was protected.” He gave a clinical, dryball, liberal policy wonk answer to the proposition, “What would you do if your wife was raped?” Not one additional shred of emotion. He was nothing more than a clinical liberal robot. Those are the three things that did him in.

Today, identifying somebody as a liberal does not harm them. They are bigger jokes about the… They’re actually dismantling the military rather than Dukakis running around looking like Beetle Bailey, and they have convinced everybody that rape is happening every day on college campus with the War on Women. But 26 years ago, the word “liberal” could kill a presidential candidate on the Democrat side. The Republicans are afraid to even use that word now.

“Oh, it’s too critical, maybe mean-spirited,” or what have you.